


The Waters of Lethe

by Saucery



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst with a Happy Ending, Assassins & Hitmen, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Collars, Coulson Lives, Drama, Friendship/Love, Government Agencies, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Memory Loss, Moral Dilemmas, Past Torture, Post-Movie(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychoanalysis, Psychological Trauma, Rehabilitation, Soldiers, Unintentional BDSM
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 04:21:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1455190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saucery/pseuds/Saucery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one in which Steve puts a collar on Bucky.</p><p>In the immediate aftermath of the movie, Fury, Hill, Coulson, Romanoff and the other loyal agents of SHIELD are trying their best to rebuild it—this time, without Hydra’s influence or interference. When the Winter Soldier is finally captured, Steve insists on looking after him, in an effort to salvage whatever remains of his long-lost friend, Bucky Barnes. It’s not as easy as Steve hopes. Especially when there’s a collar involved. And when Bucky keeps trying to kill him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Waters of Lethe

**Author's Note:**

> “Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist; I will still not have the power to forget you.” — Ovid, _The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters_.

* * *

 

The collar was a solid silver circle, seemingly without any catches or locks. It glittered like a coiled snake, the minute Asgardian words cut into it catching the light. It might’ve been beautiful, Steve supposed, if it wasn’t the cruel, dehumanizing object that it was, meant to reduce its wearer into something subhuman. Into a _pet_.

“No,” Steve said, even though he knew it was a futile denial.

“We have no choice, Captain,” Fury sighed. He looked weary, recovering from his wounds as he was. “It’s a matter of sheer luck that we captured the Winter Soldier—”

“Bucky,” Steve interrupted. “His name’s Bucky. James Buchanan Barnes.”

“No, it isn’t.” Fury’s patience was running thin, and it showed. “He has no memory of being anything other than the Winter Soldier. Until his memories return—if they return—he’ll have to be restrained.”

“Not in this way,” Steve persisted. “He’s already been treated as less than a person by Hydra. He doesn’t deserve the same treatment from us.”

“Doesn’t he? He’s a mass-murderer, whose last mission was to destroy SHIELD. Specifically, to destroy _you_. He’s still locked into that command; his brain has been hard-coded to conclude his assignment by any means necessary. He wants you dead, Captain. He isn’t your friend.”

“He will always be my friend. Whether or not he remembers it. And I think he’s beginning to.” Steve huffed in frustration. “He saved my life, Colonel. He saved me, after that fight of ours. He dragged me out of the water, and left me where it was safe. He could’ve killed me then, but he didn’t.”

“He tried to kill you again, today,” Fury reminded him, and Steve ground his jaw.

“Hydra is finished. With nobody there to reinforce his programming, he’ll come around.”

“Will he? What if he goes into withdrawal? What if he’s been conditioned to _need_ Hydra? He could fly into a berserker rage, or go into a total system shutdown. We don’t know the extent of what Hydra did to him. He might not survive without it. Like so many Hydra weapons, he might have been built to self-destruct.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I have to say that, Rogers, because we can’t afford to be sentimental. If he does self-destruct, we can’t afford to go down with him. This collar is a gift from Thor, similar to the gag the Asgardians used on Loki. It won’t cause its captive pain unless he attempts to kill anyone. If the Winter Soldier behaves himself, he should be fine.”

“If he _behaves_ ,” Steve spat. “Like a dog.”

“He’s a bloodhound, Captain. We have to train him like one.” Fury massaged his forehead. “You’re not thinking like a soldier, Rogers. You’re not thinking tactically. I understand your concerns, but you’re emotionally compromised. You’re refusing to admit that you might’ve lost Barnes forever.”

“I…” Steve’s voice broke. “I can’t lose him a second time. Please.”

Fury’s customary stern attitude faltered. He said, in a tone that implied he was going to regret it, “What do you suggest, then? We can’t let him run rampant without the collar, and we can’t let him roam SHIELD unmonitored. He’ll have to stay in a cell, like the remaining Hydra operatives.”

“He could stay with me,” Steve blurted, and Fury stared at him.

“With you,” Fury said, flatly.

Steve squared his shoulders and raised his chin. “With me,” he repeated, growing more certain as he spoke. “I’ll take responsibility for him. He won’t go anyplace without me.”

“What about your missions? SHIELD can’t afford to ground you just because you’re babysitting a professional assassin.”

“Whenever I’m needed for a mission, a regular containment squad can watch over Bucky. But while I’m here, on-base, I want to be with him. And not just because I’m ‘sentimental,’ either. You said I wasn’t thinking tactically, right? Well, I’m doing it, now. Bucky’s far more likely to remember who he is if he lives with the one person he might recognize from his past. I could jog his memories.”

“You could jog his impulse to murder.”

“Which he won’t be able to act on, if he’s wearing the collar.” Just mentioning the damned thing soured Steve’s tongue, but if that was the only means of having Bucky with him rather than alone and isolated in a featureless cell, then so be it.

“You can’t remove it, once it’s on,” Fury cautioned him. “It’ll come off on its own in a year; that’s the limit of its power. By then, the Winter Soldier’s more violent urges would hopefully have been neutralized. However, if you’re going to be his primary guardian, it should be you who collars him. Dr. Foster conveyed Thor’s message that the collar ought to be attuned to one master above all others.”

“Wait,” Steve said, horrified. “ _Master?_ I thought this thing was about preventing murder, not… not compelling servitude.” Steve couldn’t bring himself to say ‘slavery,’ but the term seared itself into his mind, regardless.

“It isn’t about that,” Fury assured him. “It’s just that the master can induce additional… punishments… at whim.”

Steve felt ill. “Even if Bucky _doesn’t_ try to hurt anybody?”

“Even then.”

How was that not slavery? Steve was more determined than ever to be in charge of Bucky. He couldn’t leave Bucky in the custody of those who might harbor vengefulness toward him; many of SHIELD’s agents considered the continued existence of the Winter Soldier an unacceptable threat, and many hated him for his crimes.

The Winter Soldier’s crimes. Not Bucky’s.

When Bucky got better, they’d see him for the hero he was. They’d see him for the _asset_ he was. Bucky had the potential to become as integral to SHIELD as Natasha or Phil or Maria were.

“If the Winter Soldier harms any member of this organization or any civilian, he’ll be imprisoned in a cell, as initially planned,” Fury said. “If you agree to that requirement, I’ll allow you to transfer him to your quarters.”

“Thank you, Colonel.” Steve saluted.

Fury grunted. “Don’t thank me yet.” He gestured to the collar, where it lay in its open velvet box on Fury’s desk. “Take this to Security, put it on the Winter Soldier and take him home.”

 _Home_. The knot in Steve’s heart eased, a little. His standard-issue SHIELD apartment hadn’t felt like home to him, not in the eighteen months he’d been living there, but with Bucky in it, it might feel like home, after all.

 

* * *

 

They were keeping Bucky sedated and bound, but he was stubbornly awake, his handcuffed wrists resting on his lap. He was sitting up on the cot behind the forcefield, his gaze as sharp as a hawk’s despite the cocktail of drugs in his blood. Steve reflected that, without the sedation, Bucky would probably have snapped the handcuffs as if they were twigs.

A rather nervous guard asked Steve if he was sure about lowering the forcefield. Another equally skittish guard described in gory detail how the Winter Soldier had fought viciously before they’d sedated him, breaking the kneecaps of three guards before four more had to hold him in place for his injection.

“We made a mistake,” the first guard said, frowning. “Injecting him was a bad idea. We should’ve used a dart on him, like you would on any wild animal.”

Steve suppressed the instinctive surge of anger at hearing Bucky being insulted in that manner. It wasn’t the guards’ fault that they didn’t realize who Bucky really was. “Please lower the forcefield,” he said for the umpteenth time. “Colonel Fury’s orders.”

After calling Fury and confirming those orders, the guards finally complied. The forcefield flickered as it went off, and Steve stepped in, unlatching the box and settling it on the cot next to Bucky. Bucky’s expression didn’t change when he saw Steve lift the collar out of it. Steve wondered where all of Bucky’s expressions had gone to—he’d had such a beautiful, mobile face, always smiling or glaring or laughing, always caught up in some incandescent emotion, lit from within.

This Bucky was also beautiful, but it was a blank, jagged beauty, carved from stone. There was none of Bucky’s softness to it, none of his warmth. Instead, it was as harsh as a winter’s night, and as dark. Steve shivered in spite of himself. The collar was as cold in his grasp as Bucky’s eyes were upon him. It occurred to Steve that he was as much at Bucky’s mercy as Bucky was going to be at the collar’s. And wasn’t that ironic? It was the sort of irony Stark would’ve appreciated.

“Hey,” Steve said, softly, kneeling in front of the cot so he was looking straight at Bucky. While Bucky’s mask was off, his armor was on, but Bucky appeared comfortable in it, as though it were a second skin. “I wish I didn’t have to do this, but the reason I can retrieve you from here is that I’ve agreed to fasten this on you. It won’t hurt unless you… try killing people. So, um, don’t.” 

Bucky somehow managed to convey his disdain for Steve’s awkwardness without moving any of his facial muscles. It was rather impressive, actually.

Steve took a deep breath and calmed himself, and then lifted the collar in a sweaty, unsteady grip. He hated this. _Hated_ it. He wanted to throw the collar aside and free Bucky, but he couldn’t.

As he’d been told, he didn’t need to unlock the collar; the instant it touched Bucky, it automatically flowed to wrap itself around Bucky’s neck, like a living creature with a will of its own. Steve found it deeply disturbing, but Bucky did nothing except raise his cuffed hands to it, his fingertips exploring the collar with the obvious intention of finding a catch.

“You can’t undo it,” Steve said, guilt choking him as relentlessly as a fist squeezing his throat. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

If Bucky was mollified by Steve’s apology, it didn’t show. He simply lowered his hands back onto his lap, expressionless as ever, and allowed Steve to move him, unresisting when Steve slid him off the mattress and onto the wheelchair the guards had brought in. Bucky wasn’t stable enough to stand on his own two feet, given the industrial-strength muscle relaxants he’d been dosed with.

“Please inject him with this every twelve hours,” the female guard said, passing Steve a selection of filled syringes in a transparent plastic case. “It’s incredibly important. His present docility is false; he’s faking compliance, plotting an escape. If he isn’t sedated on a continuous basis, he’ll attack you.”

“Of course,” Steve said, between gritted teeth, accepting the case with no intention of injecting Bucky with it. He couldn’t let Security suspect that he wasn’t planning on following their prescribed protocol for securing a prisoner, or they wouldn’t release Bucky into his safekeeping, at all.

Reams of paperwork and an endless number of signatures later, Bucky was his.

Steve did his best to hide the emotions roiling within him—joy at having Bucky _with_ him, at last, and regret at assuming the role of Bucky’s jailor. The fact that Steve had put the collar on Bucky himself sickened Steve. Would Bucky ever forgive him for this? Even if he did recall that they were friends? Friends weren’t supposed to collar each other with pseudo-sentient instruments of torture.

Arguably, friends weren’t supposed to fight each other to near-death, either, and they’d already done that—but Bucky hadn’t been in control of himself during those battles, while Steve was very much in control of himself when he’d collared Bucky. It was clear which of them was truly violating the tenets of friendship, and it wasn’t Bucky.

But shame and self-hatred wouldn’t get Steve anywhere with Bucky. Faith and love would, and Steve had unending reserves of those, reserves that had, perhaps, belonged to Bucky all along.

Bidding the guards goodbye, Steve wheeled Bucky to the secure elevator that went up to the residential quarters for SHIELD employees. He punched in his code and tapped his boot against the floor impatiently. The moment the hydraulic doors hissed shut behind them, he carded his fingers through Bucky’s hair, tucking it behind Bucky’s ears.

“We’re going home, Bucky,” he said, almost shaky with relief. “We’re going home.”

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Like my writing? Want updates? Follow me on [Tumblr](http://saucefactory.tumblr.com/)!


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